Nvidia Geforce GTX Titan unleashed

The Geforce GTX 690, the current top of the line Nvidia card, has been muscled out by the announcement of the new Geforce GTX Titan this week.

This is another super-powerful top-end graphics card from the now market leader Nvidia, and it costs a packet and a half. £830 or so to be precise.

Still, that’s nothing GTX 690 owners won’t be familiar with, as that card is nearly as expensive (though you can get one for around the £700 mark now – bargain!).

In actual fact, the Titan doesn’t necessarily offer much of a performance hike on the 690 (although the exact figures and benchmarks remain to be seen yet).

What it does boast, though, is a somewhat more compact (but still big) card, better cooling, and it offers all that high-end performance on a single card, not a dual-GPU as the GTX 690 is.

That’s important for extreme gamers, as two Titans can be hooked together in SLI mode inside an absolute beast of a machine, without having to look at greater than 2 x SLI solutions (with the diminishing frame rate returns that provides).

Technically, the Titan is interesting in that it utilises supercomputer technology (running double precision floating point operations at full-out GPU speed). Tech specs include 2,668 GPU cores (75 per cent more than the GTX 680), and 4.5 Teraflops of single precision and 1.3 Teraflops of double precision processing power.

GPU Boost 2.0 technology is also on board, which intelligently boosts performance when there’s room to do so based on the card’s temperature (much like turbo boost from Intel).

If you can afford it, there’s no doubting that this is an impressive card, although one of its main selling points – hooking up two in SLI for the maximum frame rates you could possibly get from your gaming PC – is pretty much overkill at the moment (even with the biggest monitors and resolutions).

Still, it’s pretty safe to say you’ll be quite well future-proofed with a twin Titan computer…